During the summer months, thoughts may turn to less work and more play, but learning continues year-round. In the first article in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review, psychologists V.T. Kudriavtsev and D.I. Fattakhova describe the critical role of play in developing the preschool child's imagination as a foundation for learning (“A child riding a stick is not just Petia Ivanov anymore, but a horseman as well. He may be a Red cavalryman, maybe a cowboy, maybe an athlete or a lover of horseback riding—it does not matter. He is just a horseman.”) Our next selection (“What Can Reading and Games Tell Us about Today's Children?”), by K.P. Polivanova, E.V. Sazonova, and M.A. Shakarova, focuses on plot-based role-playing games. The authors describe the characters from the popular animated children's television program Smeshariki as offering rich material for preschoolers' games, while adolescents are drawn to the world of Harry Potter for reasons the authors explore. The educated urban young people whose group dynamics are studied by anthropologist Ol'ga V. Vorobyeva participate in elaborate live-action role-playing games inspired by events from history or from the worlds created by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and Mikhail Bulgakov. The cold-war-era animated films analyzed by A.V. Fedorov carried propaganda messages for children: “Cartoons from 1949 that explored the topic of confrontation with the Western way of life relied on folklore texts and fairy tales, including traditional fairy-tale representations of wolves as negative and evil beings, magpies as stupid chatterboxes, hares as eternal victims of predatory animals, and so forth.” (We hope this author might someday take up a hermeneutical analysis of Rocky, Bullwinkle, and friends.)
In “Kafkaesque Education,” sociologist T.A. Khagurov bemoans examples of the banal and the absurd intruding in the halls of learning, notably including an appearance by SpongeBob SquarePants in his young son's classroom on Defender of the Fatherland Day. Finally, epistemologist P.A. Safronov explores the need to move from a knowledge consumption model to a knowledge creation model in “Education? What, You Really Don't Know Anything?!”
—P.A.K.